Compositions that produce a color change upon exposure to energy in the form of light or heat are of great interest in generating images on a variety of substrates. For example, data storage media provide a convenient way to store large amounts of data in stable and mobile formats. For example, optical discs, such as compact discs (CDs), digital video disks (DVDs), or other discs allow a user to store relatively large amounts of data on a single relatively small medium. Traditionally, commercial labels were frequently printed onto optical discs by way of screen printing or other similar methods to aid in identification of the contents of the disk.
Current efforts have been directed to providing consumers with the ability to store data on optical disks using drives configured to burn data on recordable compact discs (CD-R), rewritable compact discs (CD-RW), recordable digital video discs (DVD-R), rewritable digital video discs (DVD-RW), and combination drives containing a plurality of different writeable drives, to name a few. The optical disks used as storage mediums frequently have two sides: a data side configured to receive and store data and a label side. The label side is traditionally a background on which the user hand writes information to identify the disc.
Recent developments have provided for the imaging of a dye-containing coating with the lasers of commercially available optical disk drives. However, dyes used in traditional image-able coatings have either had high radiation absorption efficiency and low fade resistance, or low radiation absorption efficiency with high fade resistance and stability.